Proceedings

MaxEnt fails at reasoning by transitivity

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Abstract

In series of recent papers, Anttila, Magri, and their collaborators extend the Greenbergian implicational universals from the categorical to the probabilistic setting and use the resulting implicational universals to argue that ME typologies are less restrictive than the NHG typologies corresponding to the same constraint sets. This paper contributes to this research project. We provide a new formal constraint condition on ME universals, focus on a class of implicational universals that hold ''by transitivity'' in categorical OT and HG as well as in probabilistic NHG, and we use our new formal condition to explain why this class of universals instead fails in probabilistic ME.

Keywords: maximum entropy grammars, implicational universals, noisy harmony grammars, mathematical analysis

How to Cite:

Magri, G. & Tapani Anttila, A., (2026) “MaxEnt fails at reasoning by transitivity”, Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology 2(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/amphonology.3770